A law amendment to Mexico’s General Health Law that would allow live uterus donation from pre-menopausal women was recently proposed. This amendment, if passed, would be the first ever piece of legislation to explicitly address uterus donation at any level of government. Two objections have been raised to the amendment, by the authorities in charge of organ transplantation. In this article, I critically examine one of the objections. The objection maintains that there is no need to reform the General Health Law, because its correct interpretation entails that live uterus donation from pre-menopausal women is already permitted. In this article, I show that the objection fails, and that uterus donation from pre-menopausal women is currently forbidden. My approach is threefold. First, I show that the objector’s interpretation of the relevant article of the General Health Law commits them to some unpalatable implications. Second, I refer to interpretative criteria set out by Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice to show that the objector’s interpretation is flawed. Finally, I show, using an ordinary language approach, that the objector’s interpretation is flawed, because it renders the law inoperable. I conclude that a legislative amendment is justified, in order to ensure legal clarity and ethical consistency in uterine transplantation practices.
This article examines the legal and regulatory processes that led to the prohibition of prescribing puberty-suppressing hormones (GnRHa) for treating gender dysphoria in adolescents in the United Kingdom. Through a reconstruction of the timeline from the Cass Review to the 2024 emergency and permanent Orders under the Medicines Act 1968, we show that the measures taken were exceptional and extended far beyond established regulatory practice. Although framed as responses to safety concerns, the Orders – combined with NHS England policies and regulatory amendments – operate as a de facto universal prohibition, despite ostensibly applying only to private prescriptions. We demonstrate that the government’s actions diverged significantly from the advice of the Commission on Human Medicines, whose assessment supported regulated off-label prescribing and warned of the harms of criminalisation and treatment barriers. The article argues that the process exhibits notable irregularities, including extraordinary use of emergency powers, misrepresentation of expert advice and insufficient candour in communicating the scope and consequences of the ban.
In the United Kingdom, legal cases focused on gender care for young people have been widely publicised in both traditional and social media. As part of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Gender Identity in Children – Qualitative (LOGIC-Q) study, thirty-nine families were interviewed over five interview waves. Transcripts were analysed using a longitudinal thematic approach to understand what sense families made of various legal processes and how they experienced the practical consequences. Thirty-four families had narratives around these perceptions and experiences over the four different time-points. Three broad themes were generated: (1) Whose voice was included? (2) layers of distress and (3) families’ perceptions of legal judgements in the media. Both parents and young people spoke about experiences of anxiety and uncertainty where the consequences of judicial decisions around health care reverberated beyond the legal system itself. In this regard, the profound impact of such legal cases on the well-being of young people and their families should not be underestimated.
Insulin is essential for the survival of people living with type 1 diabetes, yet it remains inaccessible to many, particularly in low-and middle-income countries, where monopolistic pricing, fragile supply chains, and regulatory barriers compound challenges of availability and affordability. Cosmolocal production, in which knowledge and protocols are shared globally while physical production is rooted in local communities, offers a potential alternative. This article explores whether such a model might empower Uganda to re-localise insulin manufacturing, and considers the regulatory conditions necessary for it to be viable. We argue that 'regulatory sandboxes' represent a plausible legal mechanism for creating those conditions, enabling regulatory bodies to tailor oversight arrangements to novel production models without compromising safety imperatives.
Current debates on adolescent gender-affirming care often revolve around questions of decision-making capacity and informed consent. Rather than asking whether adolescents are capable of providing informed consent, this article takes a different starting point by examining the assumptions embedded in the medico-legal model of informed consent itself and how these play out in clinical practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with transgender youth and clinicians in the Netherlands, as well as observations of multidisciplinary team meetings, we analyze the tensions that arise concerning informed consent and the clinical realities of adolescent gender-affirming care. We show that informed consent becomes entangled with diagnostic assessment, treatment indication, and the evaluation of readiness, resulting in a form of normative overburdening that exceeds its conventional medico-legal function. We argue that this overburdening reflects a deeper misalignment between the medico-legal model of informed consent and the processual character of gender becoming. We conceptualize this misalignment along three interrelated dimensions: ontological, epistemic, and temporal. Together, these reveal how informed consent comes to depend on forms of subjectivity, knowledge, and temporal certainty that cannot be fully established in the context of this care practice. Instead of treating this as a problem of adolescents’ decision-making capacity or of gender-affirming care itself, we call for rethinking informed consent under conditions in which subjectivity, knowledge, and futures remain inherently in the making.
